Saturday, July 28, 2007

5 Great Books About or Involving Libraries

1. Matilda by Roald Dahl: I know Matilda has a really awful home life in this book, but I love that at the age of 4, this genius child toddles down to her local library to read Hemingway.

2. The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken: This bittersweet tale of the romance between a librarian and teenage giant is affecting, and not as "ripped from the Fark headlines" as it sounds.

3. Help! I'm a Prisoner in the Library by Eth Clifford: Again, as a child, the idea of being locked overnight in a public library sounded like absolute heaven. Now, if it was the L.A. Central Library, that probably would have freaked me out a little, but a nice small town library... what better place to be stranded in a snow storm?

4. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith: Francie is a bookish child who spends a lot of time at the Brooklyn Library, and the passages about her visits there should be read by every librarian as instruction on how NOT to do the job.

5. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami: Now, I haven't read this one, but I intend to and I feel like, since it's Murakami, it's a pretty safe bet to recommend. Besides, check this out:

"The novel, Murakami's 10th and his first big one since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in 1997, features a 15-year-old boy who runs away from his Tokyo home shortly before his father's body is discovered in a pool of blood and heads for distant Takamatsu. There he meets a mysterious librarian, who may or may not be his long-lost mother, and a sexy hairdresser, who may or may not be his vanished elder sister. Filling out the cast is an old man who lost his memory in an apparent UFO encounter but gained the power to converse with cats." (from Time magazine review)